Towards Leveraging the Concept of Influence to Enhance Collaborative Cyber-Physical Systems Development

Cyber-Physical Systems development requires the collaboration of various stakeholders from multiple domains. Whilst the functional exchanges between the design artifacts are captured using classical software engineering methods, it is common to have interactions between different domains that go beyond mere functional ones. These may not even be fully understood or known at design-time, making more difficult the rationalization of the design choices and generally speaking the collaboration. Collaborative simulation appears as a solution to observe the emerging behaviors of such systems. However, it does not help identifying the cause of changes in the emerging behaviors, e.g., when different teams made changes concurrently on their artifacts. In this paper, we propose to make explicit how some elements of the design artifacts are known (more or less precisely) to influence the behavior of other design artifacts. We argue this is beneficial for the collaborative development of CPS since it provides an enrichment of the (potentially not fully understood) semantics that exist between different elements of the systems, beyond mere functional ones. Based on our example, the paper presents a first categorization for our notion of influences as well as a discussion about potential usages and their benefits.